A dying colonialism

An incisive and illuminating account of how, during the Algerian Revolution, the people of Algeria changed centuries-old cultural patterns and embraced certain ancient cultural practices long derided by their colonialist oppressors as primitive, in order to destroy those same oppressors. Fanon uses the fifth year of the Algerian Revolution as a point of departure for an explication of the inevitable dynamics of colonial oppression.

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LibraryThing Review

User Review - StormRaven - LibraryThing

One thing needs to be perfectly clear about this book: Fanon was not a neutral observer evaluating the politics of colonial Algeria. He was an intensely interested party - despite being from ...Read full review

About the author (1967)

Martinique islander by birth and a psychiatrist by training, Franz Fanon is better known as a pan-African revolutionary ideologue. His treatises on colonialism call for revolutionary confrontation with malignant colonial regimes, where necessary on the battlefield, and, more important, for the eradication of the most invidious form of colonialism, namely, colonial mentality. Fanon holds that this mentality prevents the African and the black person everywhere even from being aware of the seriousness of the social and personal deprivations of his or her colonized status. Fanon found his voice when he worked for the Algerian revolutionaries during the Algerian War of Independence against the French. Not only did he become deeply involved in the Algerian struggle, he also emerged as its principal ideologue and formulated his anticolonial writings from the Algerian experience.